Tin House Books Accepting Unsolicited Manuscripts, with a Catch

Good news all you writers out there with finished manuscripts and no one willing to look at them: Tin House Books will be accepting unsolicited manuscripts for its fall reading period! Now is your chance to send in your masterpiece to a really awesome press and not have to worry about being rejected because you don't have an agent!

But there's a catch: they will only be accepting manuscripts that are "accompanied by a receipt for a hardcover or paperback from a real-life bookstore." The idea has stirred up quite a bit of controversy (check out the comments thread over on GalleyCat - people can be pretty harsh), but I for one think it's a pretty brilliant idea. With the future of print publishing currently in limbo, what better way to stimulate the literary economy than by reminding all of us that actually reading is a pretty huge part of being a writer? And that doesn't mean sitting in Barnes & Noble for three hours, sifting through lit journals and then walking out empty-handed; it's all about not biting the hand that feeds you. It's about being on the receiving end of good writing just as much as you are trying to contribute to it.